The article is devoted the role of the demarchos in the lease of lands in the ancient Attica (4^th century B.C.). An important source is the epigraphic evidences on leasing the lands from Attica. The article considers demarchos participation in the economic life of the polis, his administrative and finance functions in lands leasing. In the polis economic events the demarchos acted as a protector of its norms and traditions.The author looks to understand reasons for the sometimes contradictory judgments of an outstanding Roman historian on that ruler.

The article is devoted to the institutionalization of the state of Alexander the Great. The author shows that an imperial idea in Hellenistic times was the combination of Greek, Macedon and Persian state power conceptions. In Alexander the Macedonian Power an administrative system was built in order to secure the compatibility of those features.

The article examines Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) notions on the priesthood of the bishop. The associated concepts of sacerdos and pontifex organized the views of the prelate of Seville on the role of bishop in the life of society and the state. An analysis of these concepts demonstrates that it was the bishop’s priesthood perfection that determined its special status and leading role in the Kingdom of Toledo in the first third of the 7^th century. Just as sacerdos he embodied an idea of unity that underlay in the ideology of this state formation.

The paper presents a study of the image of the emperor in the apologetics of the 2^th - 3^th centuries. The very fact that first apologies were addressed to Roman rulers with and that there was an adscription to them of Christian qualities and notions as well as a reinterpretation of Roman authorities decisions - all that contributed to the formation of “Christian emperor” image. In the considered epoch such an ideal image could not so far be in tune with tens relations between the church and state. Apologetic literature was however constructing a model of the desired future, one can even find there an issue of possible nascence for an Emperor from among Christians (Tert. Apol. 21.24). A vision of Imperial Power as a necessary and important element in the providential Christian world order helped Christians to incorporate into the life of the Roman empire and was part of the strategy for forming-up a group identity.

The author of this article tries to examine, how the prominent Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus represents the rule of Constantius II who is treated in Ancient Studies rather ambiguously.

The article deals with an idea of the priority of ecclesiastical authority over the secular power in the views of the English Minorities of the 13^th century. One way of spreading and approving this idea was a sermon. The analysis of “examples” from the “Liber exemplorum” shows how theoretical constructs of intellectuals about the absolute authority of the church were declared among a broad public .

This article is dedicated to some aspects of co-existence of Jews and Christians in Bohemia and Moravia during the Middle Ages. Unlike many other European territories, Czech kingdom remained relatively untouched by practices of pogroms and blood libels. The aim of this article is to describe and to analyze the untraditional for Medieval period relative peaceful co-existence between those two communities.

The purpose of the article is by the example of anti-English treatises and pamphlets of the first half of the 15^th century to show how the contemporaries of the events perceived the treaty in Troyes (1420), and how the desire to challenge the dynastic claims of the King of England contributed to the development of an idea of the public legal basis for royal power.

The following article covers certain aspects of the functioning of a rather complicated governance mechanism in the Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The author analyzes, primarily, the two branches of power - the political power of the States General and the military power of the Stadtholderate, as well as investigates the confrontation between state leaders - the Grand Pensionary Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the Stadtholder Maurice of Nassau.

The article views the political ideas of noble elite of the Catholic League in France (1584-1592) and the succession crisis in the beginning of the War of Three Henrys. To that end the author studies the official declaration of the union, philosophical-political treatise and Henryde Guise’s private letters. Their analysis shows that the political ideal of the Catholic League noble wing was not an overthrow of the monarch and establishment of its own rule, but the limitation of King’s power, the transition of authority to the highest nobility and the reformation of the court religious policy.

The purpose of the article is to reconstruct an image of the Emperor Nicholas I power in views of his contemporaries, the French: Marquise A. de Custine, who traveled through Russia in 1839, Baron P. de Barant, who served as the Ambassador of France to the Russian Empire from 1835 to 1841, and an artist O. Vernet, who worked in Russia at the personal invitation of the Emperor in 1836 and 1842-1843. That is, they are people of different political views, different fields of occupation, so they perceived the reality of Russia in different ways. But at the same time to all of them the image of Nicholas I power and the image of the sovereign himself appeared similar, and on the whole very attractive. The article is written in the methodology of interdisciplinary synthesis based on the imago-logical approach.

The article is devoted to the formation of visual standards of Japanese propaganda images in 1870s - 1890s. As it was in the other totalitarian states of the first half of 20^th century, Japanese painters produced a large amount of visual propaganda with the style and selected subjects similar to the European ones. In the early period of making Japanese colonial Empire newspapers started to publish subjects generating typical colonial discourse based on the indigenous Far-eastern material. One of the most popular themes was the rescue of a barbaric child by a civilized Japanese male of mature years. The article considers the case by example of the following xylographs: “Botan girl” (Hyakkuri Sanjin,1874) and “Captain Higuchi” (Mizuno Toshikata, 1895).

The article considers a salon by Rahel Varnhagen von Ense - one of the most famous salonière in Prussia in the Biedermeier era (in the first third of the 19^th century) - in the context of sociocultural life of Germany in the specified period. Having been a wide-spread form of intellectual communication, salons became places for a free expression of opinion in the conditions of the strict German Confederation censorship guaranteed by the Vienna System. Based on diaries and letters by salon participants, this article determines the circle of persons belonging to Rahel Varnhagen von Ense salon and lists the issues that were discussed there.

The article considers symbols of power, through the prism of which the historical memory represented the first chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. The author gives an attention to the Bismarck towers, that were the unique phenomenon at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, an important symbol of the united German state and the a argument of the existence of the Bismarck cult among the young people of Germany. The author considers the historical reasons for Bismarck’s mythologization in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It is shown, that in modern Germany Bismarck is not perceived in the historical memory in connection with political symbols.

The object of study in the article is educational policy of the Imperial authorities in Austria-Hungary at the turn of 19^th - 20^th centuries and a struggle of the Slavic intellectuals for the opening National Universities in Brno, Trieste, Ljubljana, Lviv. The study is based on press, publicism, and archive materials. The formation of national education as an important aspect of the independence struggle is in the focus of the article study.

Die Weltbühne , which was one of the leading democratic media during the Weimar Republic, paid special attention to Russia. The Russian revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks triggered off a discussion in the German society about the possible future directions in the development of the Soviet system. The German leftist intellectuals were actively engaged in the debates on the subject of Russia, particularly during the Soviet regime emergence (1917-1921). The article demonstrates that the perception of the Soviet Russia was ambiguous and controversial on the left side of the country’s political spectrum (SPD, USPD). On one hand, the liberation from tsarism and imperial policies were hailed, but on the other hand, there was criticism towards the mass terror and violent methods used by the Bolsheviks to maintain their unchallenged power.

The article aims to conduct a historical - comparative study of party systems in Canada at the Federal and provincial levels. The author comes to the conclusion that at the national level, there is a two-party system of Canada, unlike the regional ones, where a multi-party system is a possibility. The author believes that social and regional base,shaped for party systems of Quebec, Ontario, provinces of the Canadian West, the Atlantic provinces of Canada, were closely connected with the historical, economic and national peculiarities of their development.